Why women and graduates of color get lower-paying jobs

When it comes to income, some college majors are treated better than others

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Young female college graduates and graduates of color struggle more to find higher paying jobs.

By

JillianBerman

Reporter

Students getting ready to graduate college are about to confront a real world problem: Women and people of color struggle to earn as much as their white male peers.

The job search will probably be easier for students who graduate college this year than their peers who graduated in the depths of the Great Recession or even earlier in the recovery, according to a new report released Thursday by the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington-based think tank focused on worker issues. But black and female college graduates may find the labor market tougher to navigate than their white male peers, the report indicates.

The jobless rate for black college graduates between the ages of 21 and 24 was 9.4% in the year leading up to February 2016, EPI found. That’s higher than the peak unemployment rate (9%) for their white peers of the same age during the Great Recession and recovery

Economic Policy Institute

Young black college graduates have higher unemployment rates than their white peers.

“There are many factors that lead to workers of color having much worse outcomes than white workers,”said Elise Gould, a senior economist at EPI and one of the authors of the report.

For one, African-American college graduates are overrepresented in some of the lowest-paying majors and underrepresented in some of the nation’s fastest growing and highest paying fields, according to a February study released by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. That’s in part because black students are more likely that their white peers to attend less-selective and often less-resourced schools, which may not have the money to support a wide variety of science and technology majors.

There’s also evidence that black job seekers face discrimination in the labor market, such as research, which shows that job applicants with names that people may associate with black job seekers like Lakisha and Jamal are less likely to get call backs than applicants with names like Emily and Greg.

Young women with college degrees are also at a disadvantage when they come out of school, EPI’s data indicate. College educated women aged 21 to 24 earned $16.58 on average in the 12 months leading up to February 2016, EPI found. Their male colleagues were taking home $20.94 an hour.

Economic Policy Institute

The real wages of young, college-educated women have dropped since 2000, while the real wages of young, college-educated men have grown.

What’s more, young college educated women saw their inflation-adjusted wages drop by 6.8% between 2000 and 2016. The wages of young college educated men rose 8.1% during the same period. The yawning gap between the wages of young men and women may be explained in part by particularly fast growth in mens’ wages at the top of the spectrum, which pulls up their average wage, Gould said. That raises the question as to why women aren’t getting those higher paying jobs, she added.

EPI’s analysis doesn’t adjust for things like major or career choice, so some of the gap may be because women are working in fields that typically pay less. Still, it’s troubling that the gap exists so early in a young woman’s career before she’s even had a chance to encounter some of the well-documented unconscious bias in the workplace that can often lead to women earning less money than their male colleagues later in their career.

Recent college graduates of both genders “have the same amount of education and they have very similar amounts of experience,” Gould said. “Their wages are very different.”

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